Diane Werts

Lily Moayeri

Those two alone [Raymond "Red" Reddington (James Spader) and Liz Keen (Megan Boone)] are worth watching Blacklist, but the drama's storytelling is powerful enough to make you commit to it from the very first episode.

Mary McNamara

Creator Jon Bokenkamp matches up a deliciously absurd uber-story (20 years later, rogue spy turned freelance criminal comes in from the cold...) with the mother of all procedural shticks (and he's going to bring all his friends and enemies with him). But the ace in the hole is Spader.

Terri Schwartz

The criminal-teams-with-agent dynamic is nothing new, but it's taking the journey of The Blacklist with Spader and Boone that makes this show so engaging. It only helps that they have a strong supporting cast featuring the likes of Ryan Eggold, Diego Klattenhoff and Harry Lennix.

Michael Starr

Curt Wagner

There's no doubt that The Blacklist will present a terrorist case of the week. But the marvelous action sequences and intriguing plot twists should lift it above any standard procedural.... If none of that interests you, Spader's magnetic performance alone is enough to warrant at least a couple looks.

Lori Rackl

Brian Tallerico

It helps to have a great actor like Harry Lennix in the supporting cast, but the writers of The Blacklist need to prove that it’s about more than just Red.... But, for now, Spader is enough reason to watch.

Maureen Ryan

The Blacklist is never going to be anyone's idea of great art, but at least it has a pulpy kind of momentum that may well be worth watching for a while; I will stick around to see whether Spader's performance really is the only dish on the menu.

Michael Landweber

An intriguing twist suggests her involvement in his scheme is more complicated than the setup suggests, but we knew that. Moreover, she may also be more complicated than Red anticipates, which might make the introduction of this so familiar dynamic more a point of departure than a retread. That will be helpful because, based on the first episode, The Blacklist‘s plot makes little sense.

Alessandra Stanley

Brian Lowry

Spader has always been a particularly interesting actor, and he’s well suited to this sort of twisted figure, where so much is going on behind those eyes. That said, he’s all that lifts The Blacklist above the mundane.

Alan Sepinwall

It's a pretty shameless "Silence of the Lambs" rip-off--one scene in the pilot beat-for-beat copies the "quid pro quo, Clarice" scene where Lecter gets Clarice to talk about her childhood--but also a fun character for Spader to play, and the writers know what to have their leading man do and say.

To the extent that Reddington is compelling, it’s because Spader is doing all the work. He gets little help from the pilot script, which feeds him some sharp lines but imagines him as a generically debauched mastermind.

Matthew Gilbert

Phil Dyess-Nugent

Spader is fun to watch in a shallow, ornamental way, but he’d be worth caring about if there were some limits to his character’s abilities. Instead, he’s not just brilliant, but also practically unbound by the laws of time and space.